torture
American Justice?

American Justice?

The Senate Intelligence Committee released a shocking 6,000-page report detailing the systematic abuse of “terror detainees,” yet many are defending the practices, up to torture. ...
Charles Scaliger

In his timeless essay On Crimes and Punishments — a work greatly admired by the American Founding Fathers — Italian jurist and philosopher Cesare Beccaria condemned torture with unassailable logic:

No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection, until it have been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then ... can authorize the punishment of a citizen, so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt?... If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary. If he be not guilty, you torture the innocent; for, in the eye of the law, every man is innocent, whose crime has not been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations, to expect that a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibers of a wretch in torture. By this method, the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. These are the inconveniences of this pretended test of truth, worthy only of a cannibal; and which the Romans, in many respects barbarous, and whose savage virtue has been too much admired, reserved for the slaves alone.

It is because of Beccaria’s influence that the U.S. Constitution contains protections against self-incrimination and against cruel and unusual punishment — and, by implication, torture. As Montesquieu famously proclaimed, “Every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity is tyrannical.” Torture, whether to extract information, serve as a deterrent, or even (as was once fashionable to believe) to purify the condemned from the stain of their transgressions, is not only the very embodiment of tyranny, but also ineffective and immoral. That the United States of America has begun to justify various forms of torture and summary execution without due process is a dire indication of just how far down the road to serfdom we have gone — and what awaits us if we do not soon reverse course.

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